Istwa Nou

Between 1921 and 1943 Port-au-Prince added eight thousand houses, reaching fifteen thousand recorded dwellings. Between 1931 and 1949 its population climbed from 125,000 to more than 142,208 people inside 6.7 square miles. Into that thickening city the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale placed its Foyer, a house for women sited across from the National Stadium, just south of the Champs de Mars. The address was the argument. Any woman could walk in from anywhere in the capital, through the old commercial streets and past the legislative plaza, and find other working women waiting. The stadium opposite was where the nation staged its idea of itself as male. The Foyer was a room where women did that work on their own account. Ordinary geography decides who can join a movement. A meeting house too far from the markets excludes the women who most need it, and the Ligue chose ground the whole city could reach on foot.

Bringing women together under one roof at the Foyer was an act of care and also an argument with the social science of the day. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain had been studying girls and young women in Haiti for twenty years, and she concluded that the most visible measure of the differences among them was where and how they lived. Housing carried income, work, parish, literacy and family arrangement in one observable fact. To understand the social lives of Haitian women, she argued, you had to attend to space. In an article published in 1959 she noted that most of the outsiders who had studied Haiti were Americans, and that they had described the country as a society split by culture. That insistence on a cultural cleavage between two strata had made culture appear to be the only thing separating Haitians from one another. A frame with two boxes in it, elite and peasant, cannot register a woman who works in one box and sleeps in the other.

Comhaire-Sylvain called for a study of Haitian society that drew on several disciplines at once. She was candid that such an approach would not be easy to use, and that it would be no use at all to someone without long experience in the country, because the sources were scattered, uncoordinated and full of holes. She wanted it anyway, on the evidence: her figures showed plainly that stratification in urban Haiti was far more complicated than earlier writers had described. Her criticism was aimed at the thick descriptions produced by visiting ethnographers, work that set out to see everything and, in trying, saw less than it could have. She did not name Herskovits, Hurston, Metraux or Mintz. She did not have to. The people who had made careers describing Haiti to foreign readers were being told by a Haitian woman with two decades of local fieldwork that their instruments were too coarse to pick up the country they thought they had explained.